1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a character image extracting apparatus and a character image extracting method for extracting an image of each of characters from a character string region composed of a plurality of characters.
Further, the present invention relates to a character image extracting program and a recording medium which are adapted to extract an image of each of characters from a character string region composed of a plurality of characters.
2. Description of the Related Art
A document filing apparatus has been put into practical use. In the document filing apparatus, a document can be held in a document data base which can be then searched for the document (for example, refer to Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication JP-A 2002-245062). Some document filing apparatuses utilize an image inputting device such as an image scanner to convert a document into an image and electronically store the document image, and enables searching of the document image later on. In such a document filing apparatus as has been described, it is necessary to extract images of respective characters from a character string region of the document image, so as to allow for the subsequent search.
Except for characters, the character string region may often include punctuation marks such as periods and also noise parts. The punctuation marks and the noise parts are not necessary for searching. A conventional document filing apparatus, however, extracts not only an element including characters, but also an element including punctuation marks and an element including noise parts undesirably, in extracting images of respective characters from a character string region.